Explore Flask is a book about best practices and patterns for developing
web applications with Flask. The book was funded
by 426 backers on Kickstarter
in July 2013.

I finally released the book, after spending almost a year working on it. Almost immediately
I was tired of managing distribution and limiting the book’s audience by putting
it behind a paywall. I didn’t write a book to run a business, I wrote it to
put some helpful content out there and help grow the Flask community.

In June of 2014, soon after finishing the book, I reformatted
it for the web and released it here for free. No payment or donation or anything
required. Just enjoy!

My name is Robert Picard. I’m a security consultant at Matasano Security and a Flask
enthusiast. I like Flask for its simplicity in the face of frameworks like Django that
try and be everything to everyone. That model works for a lot of people, but not for me.

First of all, I’d like to say thank you to my volunteer editor, Will
Kahn-Greene. He was great about going over my very rough drafts and
helping me decide on the scope and direction of the content. I’m looking
forward to working with him to manage the project into the future.

Another big thanks to everyone who took the time to talk with me about
how they are using Flask. This includes Armin Ronacher (Flask creator),
Mark Harviston (Elsevier), Glenn Yonemitsu (Markup Hive), Andy Parsons
(Happify), Oleg Lavrovsky (Apps with love), Joel Anderson (Cloudmancer)
and Mahmoud Abdelkader (Balanced).

The cover and all the illustrations in this book were done by Dominic
Flask.

Explore Flask wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for the hundreds of
people who backed the project on Kickstarter. A big thanks to a particularly
generous sponsor, Balanced Payments:

As promised in the Kickstarter project, here are the names of all of the generous men and women who pledged $50 or more: